Week 8 - Leaving Lockdown Low Carb Bootcamp

[BIWI]

Our last 2 weeks!

Here's the Spreadsheet of Fabulousness

Only two weeks to go!

I'm feeling that a lot of us are struggling. But it's all about how to integrate what we're learning about low carbing and how that fits with day to day eating/meals.

Above all, though, who could possibly say that the meals we're eating could not be the mainstay of family meals?!

Let's see this last fortnight as a challenge: what's your most enjoyable/family-friendly meal, that they would never realise was a 'diet' meal?!!!

Jeez! INTO the GROUND!

Good to see you @AthelstaneTheUnready - how's it all going?

The trouble about 'driving it into the ground' is knowing when you've reached the ground! How many expensive repairs do you have to undergo before you agree the ground has been reached?! TBF to DH, although our car is almost 10 years old, we've still done less than 50,000 miles in it, and it has been/is very reliable. It's just had its annual service and MOT and no repair work was necessary, so we're clearly not going to get shot of it any time soon. Which is a shame as I love cars and would love a new one

@Thinnerlikeachickendinner we are exactly the same. Our car is a 13 year old s-max we got 4 years ago when our 3rd was born. It was already pretty knackered then. It's failed every single MOT since we got it and costs us about £500-1000 per year in stuff that needs doing. We also have it serviced every 6 months. It cost us £7k and that was the most expensive car we've ever had. I just don't understand how people afford so much on cars. We don't use it for work so it's just for a monthly supermarket shop, running the kids about and weekend days out. £40 odd quid a month insurance, £27 DVLA, and £85 on diesel its the most expensive non essential thing we have. I hate it!

It's stopped locking now so we can't leave anything valuable in it. It's such a heap of junk

@MrsKoala - that's one of the reasons we've gone back to Mazda as our experience of them is that its engine is pretty much bulletproof (direct quote from a mechanic friend when we asked it it was worth buying the 2 year extended warranty beyond the year we get anyway so we cancelled it ). Mazda have also sorted out their problem with the undercarriage rusting.

The garage we use is good (recommended to us by my dad) as the mechanic there is not slow in telling us when the car is not worth "investing" in any more

We were fortunate to be able to afford a relatively "new" one as I got a surprisingly large lump from ICI when I turned 60 (only worked for them for 6 years and left over 30 years ago ), which is also paying for new bathroom and I'll still have some left over to go into an ISA

Hi everyone, am I too late to join in here? If I am I'm happy to be an observer until the next one begins ☺️

I'm doing dirty/lazy keto and have been since Monday. I did this in 2018 and lost 2 stone in 2 months, I'm not even quite sure why I came off it (think it might have been a holiday that I couldn't get back on the bus from!) but it's the best way of eating (for me) ever. It's so much easier to give up carbs when you can eat so many other things that are usually a no-no on other diets!

Doing it this time to shift the pounds and regular my cycles

Lovely aliums, Stokey. We have quite a few now, as they seem to self-seed and multiply quite readily. I love them, especially how the flowers hang so high, really adding depth. And attracting bees. HATE their messy leaves though. Always full of manky brown bits. I always want to try and plant around them, so that the leaves are hidden, but I'm not much good at design. Everythng just does its thing in its own way.

Pic of my aliums.

Hmph. Maybe it will attach this time.

That's great about the money from ICI @prettybird. I know it seems crazy to keep paying £1k per year for a car we'd be lucky to sell for £1k but we just don't have £10k spare for a car right now (or ever). Because we prioritise other things we never have it. We have a new neighbour (we live in a semi which is stand alone with the house attached, so we only really have 1 neighbour to the right) and she has a very lovely new white car which is always clean. Next to ours on the drive it's hilarious. She's having new fencing and render done and keeps asking if we want her guys to give us a quote Our house always has a pile of crap out the front waiting months for H to take it to the tip, at the moment there is a smashed up wardrobe and 2 parts of a rotting bed base. We have the trampiest house on the street! It's a standing joke with people who know us.

Welcome @gimmeavino

No idea when the next Bootcamp will be, so just jump in! (I assume you're going to follow Bootcamp rules?)

@BIWI thank you! Yes of course - dug them out and have read, all good for me 👍🏼

Should add that I'm 5ft 5 and 14st 8lb SW...a huge jump of 1 and a half stone since the first lockdown began...first goal is to just fit in to the clothes I wore early last year again!

@Random789 your garden looks fabulous! Do alliums really self seed??

We have just bought new house with 0.8 acres of seriously neglected garden (ie neglected for thirty years ) it is going to be five years work to get it sorted but I am so excited!

Wow, Thinnerlikeachickendinner, that sounds really exciting. Hard work but exciting. I think working on a neglected garden must be really lovely, rediscovering its outlines, etc. Also, whatever you do it will get better and better every year. When we moved into our house the garden was IMMACULATE and had been tended hourly by an incredibly keen and knowleadgeable gardener. So no matter what I did it gor worse every year for about ten years. THen it gradually started to feel more linke mine, and I was able to judge it on my own terms, rather than by a comparison with a halcyon past. Also, I had gained experience and started to fail less!

Perhaps they didn't self-seed, on reflection. I think I divided them a few times. I think they do also self-seed, but that tends to produce stringy little babies, like starved chives, that never come to anything.

(By 'divided' I mean separated the bulbs and replanted them.)

( Sorry, I have severe serial-posting disorder today.)

Yes it’s really exciting if overwhelming, house is also currently uninhabitable so it’s like a combination of sleeping beauty and miss havisham’s house! I know exactly what you mean about being terrified of messing up, it’s quite freeing to be able to go about hacking bits off and knowing that it’s all such a mess that it really can only improve it!

Alliums readily self seed. I'll need to take a picture of them up in the back border where they are now popping up everywhere. They've also spread into the bit where I grow hostas and they're ideal there as the hostas hide the messy leaves.

Those alliums are gorgeous @Stokey (I'm fairly sure fat can't convert into muscle?)

Had a lovely day of food yesterday: asparagus wrapped in prosciutto, baked and served with a green salad for lunch. Then met a friend at Bills in the evening and had the 8oz steak with salad and broccoli. Plus a single gin cocktail. The cocktail was delicious - it was probably a good thing I was driving.

Just bought a large piece of hot smoked salmon from a fishmonger's stall in Ditchling. My favourite part of the experience was the accompanying accordion player. Surreal

We are an older S-Max too @MrsKoala I quite like ours. Possibly because we also have a knackered Golf which I dislike. DH is currently trying to sell it. He had 4 Bulgarians getting stroppy with him one evening this week because he wouldn't sell it for £800

It's weird how much cars differ MrsKoala. I have an 11-year-old S-Max so it's a Mark I the same as yours. Mine has 116,000 miles on the clock and still drives like new. It had a new clutch at 90,000 miles but apart from that I've had no real bother with it Having said that, I've had it from new and it's been meticulously serviced every year. My DH's car was obviously owned before by someone who didn't look after it. The old oil at the first oil change looked suspiciously like it had never had an oil change on six years. Now his car is always needing something or other done on it. So maybe your S-Max was badly neglected by a previous owner and now you're paying the price.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the car particularly, I just think we trash everything we own. Not on purpose but we aren’t the type of people to bother with cleaning it, looking after it etc. It’s been driven into may poles and walls etc. It had 90k on the clock when we bought it - it’s an automatic as I can’t drive a manual car.

Last year the boot kept flashing that it was open even when slammed shut. Then I was driving home with a big shop in the back and overtook a cyclist and the boot flew open and all the shopping went over the road. When I took it to the garage there was Lego in the lock!

Alliums at the back/top of my garden. They're mostly self-seeded - I think I put in 15 initially about 10 or so years ago

That part of the garden is badly needling weeded: it's infested with creeping buttercup - but at least it hides the allium leaves

That's gorgeous, prettybird.

Lol at the trashed car with lego in the lock, MrsKoala.

My car is usually a total scruff. At the moment the back is rammed full of some garden wate that I meant to take to the dump last weekend. I think the moisture in the waste has made the car develop its own microclimate, with masses of early morning condensation.

A few years ago it was always full of my sons' spilt climbing chalk and I feared that if I was stopped by the police they would think it was cocaine.

I find it relaxing driving an old car with its share of scrapes. There is no perfection to destroy.

I have serious allium envy now. Where did mine go?

Love the car @prettybird. I had my last car ( a Seat Leon) for almost 18 years until it failed its MOT. I gave it to my nephew who had just qualified as a mechanic and he fixed it and sold it on for a tidy sum. I was gutted really because it was a fab car to drive. Not as gutted as DH who loved that car. Three years on it is still going.
I’ve just finished paying for its replacement. We needed two cars because we both worked in opposite directions and live semi rurally but of course we both wfh now and DH is retiring in September. We should get rid of one but I hate driving his large car and he hates driving my small car.

Cooked an enormous piece of salmon tonight that I'd bought half price, it felt like such an extravagant spectacle! Kale and green beans for DH and I, sweetcorn in place of the kale for DS. Thankfully my DH is fully on board with LCHF so no multiple meal messing or sides of carbs here other than for the toddler, who is not that fussy and eats a lot anyway. I think DH understood about high fat before me actually, from listening to Tim Noakes on a running podcast. I'd done low carb through the Dukan Diet and then we progressed together. Biggest leap forward was finding BIWIs rules while losing the baby weight though. We operate a sloppy maintenance mostly but as my lockdown weight crept up I'm here again, losing that same half stone!